What happened to the great train stations?

EARLIER this week, The Infrastructurist offered up two imagecollections showcasing beautiful American train stations. They're all amazing. Atlanta's Terminal Station (pictured), with its twin Italianate towers, and Savannah's Union Station, with its Spanish Renaissance-style towers, are especially striking. But both the Savannah and Atlanta stations—indeed, all 17 of the stations The Infrastructuralist features—were demolished in one or another of America's frequent spells of urban renewal madness. They were gorgeous, but they're gone now.

The archetypal victim of this kind of short-sighted silliness was New York City's original Penn Station, demolished in 1964 in what the New York Times called a "monumental act of vandalism." The original Beaux Arts edifice was replaced with the current horror, a maze of tunnels and fast food outlets underneath the hideous Madison Square Garden arena. Perhaps the definitive word on the original Penn Station's soul-crushing replacement came from Yale art and architecture historian Vincent Scully, who explained that while once "One entered the city like a god; one scuttles in now like a rat."

It didn't have to be this way. The station in New Haven, Connecticut (Beaux Arts, built in 1918) and Washington's colossal Union Station still function quite well today, as does New York's other station, Grand Central. There's no law saying that functional train stations have to be ugly, or underground. Thankfully, some New Yorkers recognise that they have options.

Gulliver has written before about Moynihan Station, the proposed solution to New Yorkers' "scuttling like rats" problem. The new station would be named after the late Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, who called the original Penn Station "the best thing in our city" and fought long and hard for an appropriate replacement. The latest plan involves the destruction of Madison Square Garden and the construction of a new train station on that site. Old Penn Station would finally have its revenge.

In fairness, not everyone likes the Beaux Arts style, and not everyone was sad to see the original Penn Station go. There's no accounting for taste. But even if you don't like their architecture, those long-vanished stations are still interesting to look at. Check them out.

It's a shame some nice old buildings were lost, but train travel was superceded by the automobile. The stations emptied out and became run down. What were they supposed to do - keep them around for decades waiting for a revival of archictectural interest? Train stations were not built for the aesthetic elite - they were businesses. Old North Station in Boston replaced something else, and that building replaced something else before it. In the ancient world, they built their great temples on the rubble of past civilizations. Things change - get used to it.

Or consider the reuse. The Musée d'Orsay across the street from the Seine River in Paris was a railroad station until its conversion. Remember, the "location location location" criterion is generally easily met for train stations

In Madrid (Spain), the beautiful Atocha station was cleverly converted in a magnificent tropical greenhouse with cafes and walking alleys for entertaining the passengers of the new station built nearby (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atocha). In Sao Paulo (Brazil) the gorgeous building of the Julio Prestes station now host a Concert Hall (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sala_S%C3%A3o_Paulo). Those are examples of greatness of the leaders that took such decisions, and knew how to treat their heritage switching it to new uses. In contrast, the case of Penn Station is, no doubt, an act of planned vandalism.

(p.s. by the way, those are seen also in airports. Florianopolis (Brazil) airport had one of the most gorgeous views of all airports I know - you could see the rain-forest covered mountains beyond the aircraft lanes. Now they installed a horrible extension of the building that ruined a great deal of this freely available natural spectacle. No more additional joy in waiting for the your flight there)

Thank heaven Union Station in Los Angeles is just far enough from the core of downtown to never have been desirable for redevelopment. America's last (i.e. most recently built: 1930s) great train station still stands, and is of increasing importance. It is lavishly beautiful, yet intimate, and with any luck, and a little commitment from the current administration, 10 years from now we will embark from there on a bullet train for San Francisco. Everything old becomes new ...

Thanks, bobierto59! My first thought at reading Gulliver was "How can they so ignorantly forget Union Station in L.A.?" It's beautiful and uniquely combines our city's historically Spanish architecture with modern sensibility. The East Coast isn't the only place with trains!

As to MarkB's comment on trains being superceded by cars, I think the irony is lost on him. That was not a 'natural progression' but a manufactured desire for the automobile as part of a concerted drive (no pun intended) towards suburbanisation. The sense of loss you see expressed here is because the tide is turning back again towards public transport, with trains in all modes (light rail, heavy rail, high speed rail) back on the agenda. And so we need some stations again (though let's not rebuild any in the Beaux Arts style please). Yes, change is a constant and hindsight all too easy, but some decisions deserve to be described as 'madness'.

The "New" Penn-Moynihan Station is another gimmick by politically-connected real estate speculators to build yet another banal shopping mall, shallowly disguised as a "classical" RR station.
It will provide no actual passenger conveniences or amenities, add no transportation infrastructure or improved trackage, signalling, power or other modern operational infrastructure, and will in fact require additional structural columns that will seriously impede the existing passenger platforms. In addition, it will be even farther away from existing subways, making it much less efficient & convenient.
Of couse it WILL funnel tens of thousands of people past shopping mall chain-store retail locations indistinguishable from those found in countless malls elsewhere, and provide subsidized space for additional unneeded overly-dense commercial highrise development above and around the station

To DMaven, I live in a concrete box, and my flat on the interior is quite posh, as well as my neighbors', and I am quite comfortable. :-)

MarkB, I believe, is right that public transport in USA has been replaced by automobile, but it is a pity, because of the difference in environmental and physical cost to the driver -- can you read a book, respond email, sleep while behind the wheel of a car? Please do not tell me if yes...

I greatly lament the loss of the original Penn Station after studying the Roman "Baths of Caracalla" on which it was modeled. The high groin vaults of coffered stone... it was living history. I also enjoy the Musée d'Orsay's renovation and reuse.

There is no Architecture at Penn Station, as there is at Grand Central, but you can get to your destination from there.
Remenber why there is a station there at all.....to get some where. Architecture, or just a big commodious space, would be nice, never the less.

Our (little) city, Wellington, realised the beauty of our 1930's railway station and recently renovated it :http://www.wellington.govt.nz/picturegallery/display-image.php?g=7&i=16http://www.nzhistory.net.nz/media/photo/wellington-railway-station
Many thousands of commuters pass through every day, the modern-ish bus terminal is far enough away across the street not to detract, and - the best part - there's a full-blown supermarket housed in the terminal building itself. It's position near the central business district makes it at most a 20-minute walk to the office or a 5 minute bus ride for and extra $1. Why isn't Wellington on the "most livable cities" list ? Perhaps the weather :-(

The Michigan Central Railway Station still stands proudly in Detroit, Michigan, the city that was instrumental through the efforts of its automobile barons and lobbyists in accomplishing an
'almost-total-vanquishment'
of all passenger railways and urban public transport in North America, (USA, Canada & Mexico). It took an economic collapse - greatly precipitated by a total dependence on private motorcars and imported oil purchased on personal credit cards.
You can view photos of the station at the following sites:

National Public Radio website www.npr.org -article:
"An Abandoned Symbol of Detroits better days".

I do hope New York can improve Penn Station, but compared to the Port Authority bus terminal, Penn Station is Grand Central!

The sad thing about the lost stations is that many of them, including the San Francisco station not mentioned here, were not replaced by anything! Just some stimulus from somewhere creating some destruction jobs.

I recently learned the front steps at the Brooklyn Museum were removed during the great depression (the first one) as an economic aide program! Argh!!!